THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN
In the annals of maritime discovery three great voyages stand out
as the most daring in their inception, the most striking in their
incidents, the most momentous in their results. They are those of
Columbus in 1492, of Vasco da Gama to the coast of India in 1498, of
Magellan in 1519-1522, and of these three, Magellan's was in some ways
the most wonderful. It was by far the longest, and was performed under
hardships and sufferings which were absent from the others. Vasco da
Gama had a powerful armament, could obtain pilots, and knew where he
was going. Columbus had a short and easy crossing, though it was into
an unknown region. But Magellan ventured down into the stormiest seas
of our globe, and after he had found a channel leading through savage
solitudes to the Pacific, had eight thousand miles of ocean to traverse
before he sighted those Asiatic isles among which he found his fate. As
the interest of the Straits, apart from the grandeur of their scenery,
lies largely in the circumstances of their discovery and the heroic
character of the man who first proved experimentally (so to speak) that
our earth is a globe, a few lines may be given to some account of his
exploit before I describe the channel itself.
Columbus seems to have set forth not so much to discover new countries
as to find a shorter way to India from the west than that known to
exist _via_ the Red Sea,[67] and which Bartholomew Diaz, by passing
the Cape of Good Hope, had almost proved to exist round Africa. As
James Russell Lowell happily said, "meaning to enter the back door of
the Old World, Columbus knocked at the front door of a New World." To
the end of his life, after four voyages, in two of which he coasted
for hundreds of miles along the shores of what we now call Central and
South America, he continued to believe that he had reached the Indies,
though he had not been able to hit upon any one of the islands or
districts supposed to exist there. When it began to be clear that there
were masses of land extending a long way to the north and south of the
part which Columbus had first struck, men tried to find a way through
this land by which Asia, still supposed to be quite near, might be
reached. Portuguese and Spanish navigators followed the coast of what
we call South America a long way to the south, while others explored
northwards. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus of
Darien, discovered the Pacific Ocean, which he called the South Sea;
and it began to be conjectured that there might well be a great space
of water to be crossed before India could be reached, though nothing
shewed how wide it was or whether it was anywhere connected with
the Atlantic. Six years later, in 1519, Magellan was commissioned by
Charles, king of Spain (not yet the Emperor Charles V) to try to find
a passage from the Atlantic into the sea which washed eastern Asia
and so to reach, if possible, the rich Spice islands (the Moluccas)
already known to lie off the Asiatic coast. He sailed with three ships
in August of that year, and began his search for a westward passage
at the Rio de la Plata, which had already been reached (in 1516) by
Spanish sailors. He wintered on the coast of Patagonia at a spot where
Francis Drake also spent the winter fifty-eight years later, and on
the 21st of October, being the day of the Eleven Thousand Virgins,
sighted a low promontory which he called after those saints and which
is still the Cape Virgenes of our charts. Just beyond and inside this
promontory there opens to the west an inlet of the sea, which he
sent two ships to explore. They seem, from the description given by
Pigafetta, the Italian chronicler of the expedition, who was on board,
to have gone through two channels, now called the First and Second
Narrows, into the great piece of open water opposite the place we call
Punta Arenas (though possibly they stopped at the entrance of the
Second Narrows), and they returned thence with an account so favourable
that Magellan entered the strait on All Saints Day (November 1). Had
he not found it, his purpose was to sail on steadily southward till
he reached latitude 75° south. Long before that he would have been
stopped by the frozen shores of Graham Land, nor did any one get down
to latitude 75° till 1823. He passed both Narrows, crossed the open
piece of water, and then, halting at a point where the channel forks,
he sent out two of his ships to examine the southeasterly one while he
took the southwestern. Thereafter, stopping again, and making a pilot
climb a hill to see if the channel came to an end, he sent on boats
to explore further. They returned--so says Pigafetta[68]--in three
days and reported that they had seen a cape and beyond it open sea.
Thereupon Magellan cast loose from the shore to which he was moored and
with two out of his three ships (for one of those sent to reconnoitre
had deserted and gone back to Spain) sailed out to the west, and on
November 28 entered the Pacific. When he perceived that there was a
vast sea before him, he called the cape Deseado (the desired) and wept
for joy. Thence, turning first north and then northwest, he got into
the southeast trade-wind, and sped along before it, making from fifty
to seventy leagues a day. Before this steady breeze he sailed for three
months and twenty days over the boundless waste of waters, his crews
reduced to the last extremity by famine and scurvy, till he reached
the Ladrone Islands. "Had not God and His Blessed Mother given us
good weather," says the Italian chronicler, "we should all have died
of hunger in that exceeding vast sea. I do not believe that any such
voyage will ever be made again." Perhaps it was because the subsequent
sufferings made their time in the Straits seem agreeable by comparison
that Pigafetta has nothing but good to say of the latter. "There were,"
he says, "safe ports every half league, and plenty of water and good
wood. I do not believe there is a more beautiful country or a better
strait than that in the world."
Sir Francis Drake, whose passage of the Straits in 1578, on his famous
circumnavigation of the globe, seems to have been the next recorded
one after Magellan's, got through in sixteen days, but encountered
frightful weather when he emerged into the Pacific, which drove him a
long way south, perhaps nearly as far as Cape Horn.[69] The passage
from east to west which Magellan and Drake took is more impressive than
that from west to east, because it begins between low shores in quiet
and even tame scenery, which rises into grandeur as one approaches the
Pacific. We, however, had to take the Strait the opposite way, and so I
will describe it.
The last Chilean port at which the ocean-going steamers bound for the
Atlantic call is Lota, near Talcahuano, of which I have already spoken
(see page 227). From this it is a voyage of three days to the west
end of the Strait. The steamer keeps so far out that in the cloudy
weather which usually prevails it is only at intervals that one can
see the lofty hills. This is one of the wettest and windiest parts of
the Pacific, and it is in this region, between latitude 45° south and
Cape Horn, that seas heavier than elsewhere in the world are apt to be
encountered. We had the usual weather, cold and wet, with a southwest
wind which sometimes rose to three-quarters of a gale. It is, however,
a good rule to keep the deck whenever you can do so without the risk
of being drenched or perhaps knocked down and swept along by a wave
coming on board; and the want of anything else to occupy the eyes was
compensated by the delight of watching the flocks of sea-birds which
followed and circled round the ship day after day. Chief among them
was the albatross, whose aspect is that of a gigantic gull. There were
usually two or three, and, as has often been observed, they seemed
scarcely to move their wings, but to float along, rising and falling
without effort and often moving faster than the ship, of which they
usually kept astern. Steady as was their flight, it would have needed
a good marksman to hit one with a cross-bow, had such a weapon been
by ill luck on board. Among the other birds,--there were at least
forty or fifty playing round the ship, but it was impossible to count
them accurately,--the largest was the giant petrel or "bone breaker,"
which somewhat resembles an albatross, save that he is dark, and the
handsomest was the so-called Cape pigeon. He is bigger than a pigeon
and no more like one than is implied by the fact that he is more like a
pigeon than a gull. The grace of his circling flight, and the black or
dark brown spots on the dazzling white of his wings, made it a constant
pleasure to watch him, but it was hard either to follow the course
of any particular bird or to be sure that our count of the spots was
correct. When any remains of food were thrown overboard, the whole
swarm darted at once upon it, fluttering and cluttering together on
the surface of the sea, with much splashing and jostling, but never,
so far as we could observe, fighting with one another. Even the great
albatross did not seem to abuse his strength against the Cape pigeon.
When they had seized what they could, all easily overtook the ship,
though by that time perhaps two or three hundred yards away. The
dulness of three tempestuous days under gloomy skies was redeemed by
the joy of watching these beautiful creatures, happy in having their
lot cast on a wild and lonely coast, where they are safe from the
predatory instincts of man.
This long line of islands, stretching along the coast from Chiloe
seven hundred miles to the opening of the Straits, is practically
uninhabited, though a few wretched Indians wandering about in canoes
support life by fishing. Between the isles and the mainland is a
labyrinth of sounds and bays studded with other islands, great and
small, all covered with wood so close and thick as to be almost
impenetrable. The scenery, especially towards the south in the long
inland sea called Smyth's Channel, has excited the admiration of those
few travellers who have been fortunate enough to see it. This we had
hoped to do, but found that the German steamers which used to take the
route through these channels into the Straits had ceased to do so on
account of the dangers of the navigation, there being so much fog and
rain, such strong and uncertain currents, and so many sunken rocks
that even with the help of the charts which the British Admiralty
has published, it is hazardous to move except in broad daylight.
Lighthouses there are none. One line of small steamers does run from
Punta Arenas in the Straits through the channels up to the south
Chilean ports, but to have waited for a boat of this line would have
involved a month's delay, so we had to comfort ourselves by reflecting
that had we been able to catch a vessel traversing this fairyland of
wood and water and snowpeaks rising above land-locked fjords, still
the chances of weather good enough to enable it to be seen and enjoyed
would have been slender. For a description of it the reader may be
referred to the book of Mr. Ball.[70] Were it not so far from the
countries where rich men own yachts, it would be a superb yachting
ground for those who could spare the time to explore its recesses,
moving only by day, and with unceasing circumspection.
Among the headlands which we saw along this stern and lofty coast, two
were especially striking from their height and form. One is called Tres
Montes. Heavy clouds hid its top, but two thousand feet were visible of
the steep face that rose above the sea. Further south the huge tabular
mass of Cape St. George, grand and grey in its drapery of mists, looked
out over billows, the spray of whose crests as they broke upon the
rocks could be seen fifteen miles away. There is not in the world a
coast more terrible than this. No hope for a ship driven in against it
by the strong currents and the resistless western swell. Still further
south, on the fourth day of our voyage, after a night in which the
vessel, steady sea boat as she was, rolled so heavily that it was hard
to avoid being pitched out of one's berth, we reached a group of high
rocky islands, called the Evangelists,--they seem from a distance to be
four, but are really five,--on which the Chilean government has lately,
in spite of the difficulty of landing in an always troubled sea,
erected a lighthouse. Its light, 190 feet high, is visible for thirty
miles, and was greatly needed, for vessels found it hard in the thick
weather that is frequent here to make the entrance to the Straits. The
group is conspicuous by a hole through one of the highest cliffs, and
a long curved and contorted stratum of white quartz along the face
of another. Not even on the coast of Norway can I remember anything
grander than this wild sea, flashing and seething round these lonely
isles. No other land was in sight, though the blackness of a distant
cloud shewed that there were hills behind it. An hour and a half later
there loomed up in the south, through driving rain-clouds, a dark mass
which presently revealed itself as a tower of rock springing out of
the sea, with crag rising above crag to a lofty peak behind. This rock
tower--Cape Pilar--marks the entrance to the Straits. Beyond it an
ironbound coast runs down four hundred miles southeast to Cape Horn.
It is a coast which ships seldom see, for steamers, of course, prefer
the Straits; and the very few sailing vessels that still come round
this way to the Atlantic from San Francisco or Valparaiso or Australia
give a wide berth to these savage and storm-swept shores. When we had
gone some ten miles further, the steamer turned her course eastward,
and entered the opening, about fifteen miles wide, between Cape Pilar
on the south and Cape Formosa on the north. We were now on the track of
Magellan, for Pilar is the cape which he saw and named the Desired Cape
(Cabo Deseado) when the seaway opening to the west assured him that the
ocean he was seeking had been found. Standing high on the bow of our
ship and looking along it as it plunged in the great rollers, how small
this ocean steamer seemed compared to the vast landscape around. Yet
how much tinier were the two vessels with which Magellan ventured out
into the billows of an unknown sea.
Before us the inlet narrowed to a point scarcely seen in the vaporous
haze. To the south the bare peaks of Desolation Island, beginning from
Cape Pilar, rose with terrific boldness, unscaleable shafts and towers
of rock that recalled the shapes of the Coolin hills in Skye or the
still loftier summits of the Lofoten Isles in Norway. To the north a
mysterious fringe of islands and foam-girt reefs, grey and dim among
their mists, hid the entrance to Smyth's Channel and the labyrinth
of almost unexplored sounds and inlets along the Chilean coast
beyond. Behind us the sun, now near his setting, threw from among the
scattering clouds a flood of yellow light over the white-topped surges
that were racing in our wake. One thought of Magellan's tears of joy
when these long surges on which his little vessel rose told him that
here at last was that ocean he had set forth to find and over which lay
the path of glory that for him led only to the grave. Such a moment was
worth a lifetime.
As our ship passed further and further in between the narrowing shores,
the birds began to drop away from us, first the great albatross,
which loves the open sea, and then the smaller kinds. So, too, the
billows slowly subsided, though the wind was still strong and the
water still deep and the sea wide open behind us, until when we had
gone some fifteen miles beyond Cape Pilar the ocean swell was scarcely
perceptible.
Among the isles on the north side of the Strait the most conspicuous
is that to which, from its high-gabled central ridge, the name of
Westminster Hall has been given. It seemed strange to find in this
remote region nearly all the headlands, bays, and channels bearing
English names, but the explanation is simple. As there were no
native names at all, the Fuegians not having reached that grade of
civilization in which distinctive proper names are given to places,
and extremely few Spanish names, because the colonial government never
surveyed the Straits and few colonial vessels entered them, the British
naval officers who did their hydrographic work in and around the
Fuegian archipelago were obliged to find names. Like Cook and Vancouver
in the north Pacific they bestowed upon places the names of their
ships, or of their brother seamen, or of persons connected with the
British Admiralty at home. Hence Smyth's Channel and Cockburn Channel
and Croker Peninsula and Beagle Sound and Cape Fitzroy and Fury Island
and Mount Darwin. The Dutch captains, sea-rovers or whalers, have
contributed other names, such as Barnevelt Island and Staten Island
and Nassau Bay and Cape Horn itself. Thus a chart has here the sort of
historic interest which the plan of an old city has, where the names of
streets and squares speak of the persons who were famous when each was
built, like Queen Anne Street and Harley Street and Wellington Street
in London, or the list of Napoleonic victories which one has in the
street names of Paris.
The Admiralty surveys have also named the different parts of the long
line of the Straits. First comes, beginning from the westward, Sea
Reach, which, narrowing gradually till it is about four miles wide,
has a length of about thirty miles; then Long Reach, thirty-five miles
long, and averaging two to three miles wide; then the shorter, and in
parts narrower, Crooked Reach, and English Reach, which brings one to
Cape Froward, nearly halfway to the Atlantic. Darkness fell before we
came to the end of Sea Reach, and we had our last view of the range of
formidable pinnacles and precipices which, beginning from Cape Pilar,
run along the shore of Desolation Island, the northernmost of the
mountainous isles that lie between the Straits and Cape Horn. It is
separated from the two isles next to it on the southeast by channels so
narrow that the three were long supposed to form one island. The peaks,
some of them apparently inaccessible, are of bare rock and run up to
four thousand feet. On the slopes near the shore there is a little
short grass, but no wood, so violent and unceasing are the winds.
The sea was absolutely solitary. For three days we had seen no ship.
Formerly a few Fuegians in their canoes haunted these shores, but they
now come no longer. Scattered remnants of their small tribes, Yahgans
and Alakalufs, wander along the shores of the more southerly islands,
supporting existence on shell-fish and wild berries. With the exception
of the now all but extinct Bushmen of South Africa and the Veddas of
Ceylon, they are the lowest kind of savage known to exist, going almost
or quite naked, rigorous as is the climate, possessing no dwellings,
and having learned from civilized man nothing except a passion for
tobacco. There are missionaries at work among them who have done what
can be done to ameliorate their lot, which would be even more wretched
if they knew it to be wretched. They would appear, from the vast
remains of their ancient middens, to have inhabited these inhospitable
regions for untold ages, and their low state contrasts remarkably with
the superior intelligence and the progress in some of the arts of
life which mark the Lapps and Esquimaux and other barbarous tribes of
regions far nearer to the North Pole than this is to the South. The
contrast may possibly be due to the greater scarcity of wild creatures
both on land and sea in this extremity of South America.[71] Here are
no bears, black or brown or polar, and no creature like the reindeer
of Lapland, and no musk-ox; nor has the dog ever been harnessed.
Next morning we were up on the bridge beside our friendly captain at
the first glimmer of dawn. The vessel, going at half speed during the
night, had covered no great distance, but the character of the scenery
had already changed. Here in Long Reach the Strait was only three miles
wide. The spiry pinnacles of Desolation Island had been replaced by
mountains nearly or quite as high, but of more rounded forms, their
faces breaking down sometimes in cliffs, but more frequently in steep,
bare slopes of rock to the deep waters, their glens filled with blue
glaciers, which sometimes came within two hundred yards of the sea,
their upper slopes covered with snow or névé, which seemed to form
vast ice fields stretching far back inland. Clouds lay heavy on these
snows, so only here and there could one discern the outlines of a peak,
and conjecture its height. The tops seemed to average from twenty-five
hundred to four thousand feet, and the level of the line of perpetual
snow to be somewhat over three thousand feet, varying according to the
exposure, the line being, of course, a little higher on the south side,
whose slopes face the north. On the lower declivities towards the sea
there was now some grass, and in sheltered places, such as the heads
of inlets, a little thick, low scrub of trees, probably of the two
Antarctic beeches,[72] which are here the commonest trees. What most
struck us was the similarity of the mountain lines and their general
character to those of the extreme north of Norway, between Tromsö
and the North Cape. Everything seemed to point to an epoch when the
glaciers, formerly more extensive than now, rounded off the tops of the
ridges, and smoothed the surfaces, just as one finds them rounded and
smoothed along the Lyngen fjord on this side the North Cape. It is also
natural to suppose that rain and wind, which seem to be less copious
and less violent in this part of the Straits than at their western
opening, have done less here than they do there to carve the peaks into
sharp spires and jagged precipices.
The day, when it came, was dark, for a grey pall of cloud covered
sea and mountains; but as this was the usual weather, and suited the
sternness of the landscape, we regretted only the impossibility of
seeing the tops of the highest hills that rose out of the undulating
snow plateau which lies back from the shores. Very solemn was this
long, slightly winding channel, deep and smooth, broken rarely by an
island or a rock, but now and then shewing a seductive little bay with
a patch of green. Sometimes in a glen running back to the foot of a
glacier one caught the white flash of a waterfall. The remarkable
purity of the ice and smallness of the moraines may be attributed to
the fact that the glaciers seemed to be seldom overhung by cliffs
whence stone would fall, and that the rocks were evidently extremely
hard. They seemed to belong to the ancient crystalline group, granite
and gneiss or mica schist, with masses of white quartz, shewing no
trace anywhere of volcanic action. This region on both sides of the
Straits may be a prolongation not of the great Andean Cordillera,
but of the Coast Range of Chile, which (as already observed) mostly
consists of those older rocks which I have just mentioned.
At Crooked Reach the view, looking back westward, was specially noble.
On a green slope above a sheltered inlet upon the south side are a few
houses, the melancholy remains of a Swiss colony, founded some twenty
years ago, which failed to support itself in this inclement nature.
Behind there was a long curtain-like line of snows. On the north two
or three small isles fringed the steep rocky shore with a background
of peaks dimly seen through drifting snow showers. In the middle the
eye rested on the smooth, grey-blue surface of the great waterway, here
only a mile wide, dark as the clouds above and darker still in spots
where a gust from the hill fell upon it, silent as when Magellan's prow
first clove it. For steam vessels the navigation is not dangerous,
since, though there are in this narrow part no lights, there are few
sunken rocks. A rock is always indicated by the masses of very long,
yellowish brown seaweed which root on it and wave in the tide. But
squalls or williwaws (as they are called) come down from the glens with
terrific suddenness, and the water is so deep that it is often hard
to anchor, or to keep the ship, if anchored, from dragging. Magellan
moored his vessels to the shore every night. How did he manage to get
through so quickly, against the prevailing west winds, by tacking in a
channel so narrow, especially as in those days mariners could not sail
so near the wind as we do? Perhaps he may have made much use of the
tide, mooring when it was against him and pushing ahead when the ebb
set out to the Pacific. The tide flow is, however, not so strong here
as is that which enters on the Atlantic side, and it there rises to a
much greater height.
About this point another change comes over the scenery. There begins to
be more wood, and though it is still stunted, one notes patches of it
up to eight hundred feet. On the north shore more recent sedimentary
strata, apparently of sandstone and limestone, replace the gneiss,
and a growth of herbaceous plants and ferns drapes the face of the
cliffs. Then at the end of English Reach rises a bold headland, Cape
Froward, twelve hundred feet high, projecting from the much loftier
Mount Victoria behind. It marks the southernmost extremity of the South
American Continent in latitude 52°. Here the coast-line, which had
been running in a generally east southeasterly direction all the way
from the Pacific, turns sharply to the north, and in a few miles a new
scene is disclosed. The Strait widens out, an open expanse of water
is seen to the northeast with a low shore scarcely visible behind it;
and to the south, nearly opposite Cape Froward, a channel diverges to
the southeast between high mountains on its west side and lower hills
on the east. This is the north end of Cockburn Channel, which, after
many windings among islands, opens out southwestward into the Pacific,
and this seems to be the place where Magellan halted, sending out the
two ships--one of which deserted him--to explore the southeastward
channel. Looking up it one can see in clear weather, some forty miles
away, the peak of Sarmiento, highest of all the mountains of this
region, a double pyramid of rock peaks rising out of snow. It is of old
crystalline rock and is described as by far the most striking object
in all the Magellanic landscapes. Thick clouds hid it from our longing
eyes. Its height is estimated at six thousand feet, and so far as I
know it has never been ascended. That dauntless climber, Sir Martin
Conway, who got nearer to its top than any one else has ever done, was
turned back by a frightful tempest below the last rock peak.
East of Cape Froward, one is at once in a different region with a
different climate. The air is drier and clearer. The shores are lower,
the wood, still mostly of the Antarctic beech, is thicker, with many
dead white trunks which take fire easily. The hills recede from the
sea, and grow smoother in outline, finally disposing themselves in low
flat-topped ridges, six or eight miles behind the shore-line. A wide
expanse of water, and of land almost as level as the water, stretches
out to the eastern horizon, so that at first one fancies that this
apparently shoreless sea is part of the Atlantic, which is in fact
still nearly a hundred miles away. Signs of civilization appear in
a lighthouse at San Isidro, and near it at a small harbour on the
mainland to which a few whalers resort, boiling down into oil the
produce of their catch. Presently the masts and funnels of vessels
lying off shore at anchor rise out of the sea, and we heave to and
disembark at the little town of Punta Arenas on the Patagonian coast,
which English-speaking men call Sandy Point. This is the southernmost
town not only in Chile, but in the whole world, twenty degrees further
from the South Pole than Hammerfest, an older and larger place, is
from the North Pole. It consists of about six very wide streets, only
partially built up, running parallel to the shore, which are crossed
at right angles by as many other similar streets, running up the hill,
the houses low, many of them built, and nearly all of them roofed,
with corrugated iron. It has, therefore, no beauty at all except what
is given by its wide view of the open sea basin of the Strait, here
twenty miles wide, and beyond over the plains of Tierra del Fuego, the
great island which lies opposite. In the far distance mountains can
in clear weather be seen in the south of that island, Mount Sarmiento
conspicuous among them.
Punta Arenas was for many years only a place of call for whalers,
since hardly any trading vessels passed through the Straits before the
days of steam, and thereafter for a while a Chilean penal settlement.
It grew by degrees and has profited by the discovery of lignite coal
in its neighbourhood, though the seam is small and of poor quality;
and within the last twenty years it has increased and thriven because
sheep farming has been started on an extensive scale on the mainland
of Patagonia as well as in Tierra del Fuego and some of the adjoining
islands. All the sheep ranchmen within a range exceeding several days'
journey come here for their supplies and all ship their wool from here,
so it can now boast to be the leading commercial centre of the region,
having no rival within a thousand miles. Whether it can develop much
further may be doubtful, for traffic through the Straits will not
greatly increase against the competition of the Trans-Andine railway
for passengers and that of the Panama Canal for goods, and most of the
land fit for sheep farming has been already taken up. Neither the whale
fishery nor sealing is now prosecuted on a large scale.
The town is a cosmopolitan place, in which English, as well as Spanish
and to a less extent German (for the steamers of a well-appointed
German line call frequently), is spoken; people engaged in the sheep
trade come and go from the Falkland Islands, and the ocean liners keep
it in touch with the distant world of Valparaiso and Buenos Aires and
Europe. It is the same distance to the south of the Equator as the
Straits of Belleisle in Labrador is to the north, but the climate here
is far more equable. It is never warm, but the winters are not severe,
there is little snow, and frosts are moderated by the adjoining sea.
The air is dry and healthy with a rainfall of only ten inches in the
year. Though the landscape is bare, for trees can with difficulty be
induced to grow, and though there is much wind and no shelter, still
we found something attractive in this remote and singular spot, for
one has a constantly stimulative sense of the vast expanse of sky
and sea and the distant plain of Tierra del Fuego, with a touch of
mystery in the still more distant ranges of that island which just shew
their snowy peaks on the horizon. The light over sea and shore has an
exquisite pearly clearness which reminds one of the similar light that
floats over the lagoons between Venice and Aquileia. Can this peculiar
quality in the atmosphere be due, here as there, to the presence of a
large body of comparatively smooth and shallow water, mirroring back to
heaven the light that it receives?
Tierra del Fuego, which one had been wont to think of as a land of
dense forests and wild mountains, is, as seen from Punta Arenas, and
all along the eastern part of the Straits from this point to the
Atlantic, a featureless level. Its northern part is flat, like the
Patagonian mainland, which is itself the southernmost part of the great
Argentine plain. Some parts are arid, but most of it is well grassed,
excellent for sheep. Only in the far south are there mountains, the
eastern prolongation of the range that runs (interrupted by channels
between the isles) southeast from Cape Pilar. Neither along the shores
of the Strait nor in those southern mountains are there any signs of
volcanic action, but I was told that such evidences do exist at the
extreme eastern end of the island, and there are in the Patagonian
mainland, a little way north of the Straits, a large crater and a lava
stream eighteen miles in length, the last manifestations to the south
of those volcanic forces which are visible along the whole line of
the Andes northward to Panama. Both in Tierra del Fuego and on the
mainland there are left a few Patagonian aborigines. Those who dwell in
the island are of the Ona tribe, tall men who, like the Tehuelches that
roam over the mainland, answer to the description of the Patagonian
giants given by the early Spanish and English navigators. Pigafetta
relates that when Magellan's men had, near Port St. Julian, where
he wintered, guilefully entrapped and fettered one of these giants,
he cried out on Setebos to aid him, "that is," says Pigafetta, "the
big devil" (_il gran demonio_). Shakespeare would seem to have taken
from this account, through Eden's _Decades of the New World_, the
Setebos whom Caliban names as "his dam's god" in the _Tempest_.[73]
The Onas who used to come down to Punta Arenas to sell guanaco skins
and obtain ardent spirits, are now seldom seen. Strong liquor was too
much for them, as it was for Caliban, and has reduced their numbers.
It is curious that the far more abject Fuegians, who love tobacco,
detest intoxicating liquors. But the chief calamity that befell this
interesting tribe was the discovery that the more level parts of Tierra
del Fuego are fit for sheep. The ranchmen drove off the Onas: the Onas
retaliated by stealing the sheep and when they got a chance, shooting
the ranchmen with arrows, for they have scarcely any firearms. The
ranchmen then took to shooting the Onas at sight, so that now, out of
three thousand who used to inhabit Tierra del Fuego, there are said to
remain only three hundred, defending themselves in the recesses of the
wooded mountains in the extreme south of the island. They are manly
fellows of great strength and courage, and go about clothed only with a
guanaco skin. Few guanacos are now left, for they also have had to make
way for the sheep.[74]
After midnight the steamer left Punta Arenas for the Atlantic. Rising
at daybreak I saw the eastern half of the Straits, than which nothing
could be less like the western half. After traversing for some distance
the wide basin between the mainland and Tierra del Fuego, on the west
shore of which Punta Arenas stands, we reached the part of the Strait
called the Second Narrows, where the passage, between low bluffs of
hard earth on each side, is only a few miles wide, and then emerged
from this into another large basin. Twenty miles further come the First
Narrows, narrower than the Second, and then a wide bay, which in its
turn opens into the Atlantic between two low capes, that on the north
being Virgenes, and that on the south Espiritu Santo. Here it was that
Magellan anchored while his two small ships went ahead to explore. The
space between the capes, which is the eastern mouth of the Straits, is
about ten miles wide. The coast here, as well as both shores of the
Straits all the way from Punta Arenas, is perfectly flat, with a very
slight rise of ground some miles back on the Patagonian side. Clear as
was the air, no hills were visible in the distance, neither those in
the south of Tierra del Fuego nor those westwards behind Cape Froward,
where the Andes end. Over all this vast plain not a dwelling or sign
of life could be discerned save the lighthouse on Cape Virgenes,
where the boundary line between Chile and Argentina strikes the sea.
The northeastern part of Tierra del Fuego belongs to the latter, the
southwestern part to Chile. From below the cape, a low point runs out
into the sea, to which British mariners have given the familiar name of
Dungeness from its similarity to that curious shingle bank which the
tides of the English Channel have piled up on the coast of Kent. It is,
however, much shorter than our Dungeness and the pebbles of the shingle
are smaller.
Before I close this account of the Straits, a few remarks may be
added on their general physical character, which some of my readers
may have pictured to themselves as very different from what one finds
them to be. I had myself done this, fancying them to be a channel long
and narrow all the way from ocean to ocean, a channel between steep,
dark hills, covered with dense forests, with volcanoes, more or less
extinct, rising behind. Nothing could be further from the reality.
Magellan's Straits are unlike any other straits in this respect,
that the physical aspect of the two ends is entirely different. The
character of the shores on each side is the same in each part of the
channel, but both shores of the eastern half, from the Atlantic to
Cape Froward, are unlike those of the western half from Cape Froward
to the Pacific. The former has low banks, with smooth outlines, slopes
of earth or sand dipping into shallow water, and a climate extremely
dry. The latter half is enclosed between high, steep mountains which
are drenched by incessant rains. The eastern half is a channel, narrow
at two points only, leading through the southernmost part of the vast
Argentine plain, which has apparently been raised from the sea bottom
in comparatively recent times. The western half is a deep narrow cut
through the extremity of a great mountain system that stretches north
for thousands of miles, forming the western edge of South America, and
the rocks on each side of it are ancient (palæozoic or earlier). The
western half is grand and solemn, with its deep waters mirroring white
crags and blue glaciers. The low eastern half has no beauty save that
which belongs to vast open spaces of level land and smooth water over
which broods the silence of a clear and lucent air. A more singular
contrast, all within a few hours' steaming, it would be hard to find.
Unlike, however, as these two halves of the Straits are, they are both
impressive in the sense they give of remoteness and mystery, a passage
between two oceans through a wilderness most of which is likely to be
forever left to those overwhelming forces of nature, rain and wind and
cold, which make it useless to man.
Magellan's discovery of the Straits and circumnavigation of the globe
was an event of the highest geographical significance, for it finally
proved not only that the earth was round, and that the western sea
route to India, of which Columbus dreamed, really existed, but also
that the earth was immensely larger than had been supposed. A few years
after Magellan, Pizarro and his companions, sailing southward from
Panama to northern Chile, proved that the "South Sea" discovered by
Balboa stretched so far to the south that it must be continuous with
that which Magellan had crossed to the Philippines. Thereafter, not
much was done in the Southern Hemisphere until the discovery of New
Zealand and Australia two centuries later. But no great importance,
either commercial or political, belonged to a long and narrow strait
which it was extremely difficult to navigate against the prevalent
west winds, so when it was presently discovered that there was an open
sea not much farther south, it was round Cape Horn and not through
the Straits that most of the English and Dutch adventurers made their
way to plunder the Spaniards on the Pacific coast; and when the trade
restrictions Spain had imposed finally disappeared at the end of the
eighteenth century, commerce also went round Cape Horn, tedious and
dangerous as was the passage to those who had to face the prevailing
westerly gales. Even in the days when Charles Darwin sailed in the
_Beagle_ under Captain Fitzroy, hardly any merchant vessels traversed
the Straits. It was the application of steam to ocean-going vessels
that gave to this route the importance it has since possessed.[75] It
is now threatened, as respects passenger traffic, with the competition
of the Transandine railway; as respects goods traffic, with that of the
Panama Canal, and it may possibly retain only so much of the latter as
passes between Pacific ports south of Callao and Atlantic ports south
of the Equator.
The morning was brilliant with blue wavelets sparkling under a light
breeze as we passed out to the east and saw the low, flat bluff of Cape
Virgenes sink below the horizon. But the wind rose steadily, and next
morning the spray was dashing over the vessel when we caught sight,
through drifting clouds, of the shores of the Falkland Isles. They
were wild and dreary shores bordered by rocky islands and scattered
reefs, no dwellings anywhere visible on land, nor any boats on sea.
In the afternoon, having passed, without seeing it, the mouth of the
channel which separates the East from the West Falkland, we anchored
in the deep bay which forms the outer harbour of Port Stanley, the
chief harbour and village of the islands. The wind was still so strong
that our careful captain decided not to take his vessel through the
very narrow passage which leads to the inner harbour, so we got
into the tiny launch which had come out with the mails, and after a
tumble in the waves and a run through the narrows found ourselves in
a landlocked inlet, on the shore of which stands the capital city of
this remote and lonely part of the British Empire, a place of a few
hundred inhabitants. Here was Government House, a substantial villa
of grey stone. Indoors we found a cheerful little drawing-room with a
cheerful blaze in the grate, a welcome sight to those who had not seen
a fire during three weeks of almost constant cold. There was a tree
beside the house, the only tree in the islands, and a conservatory full
of gay flowers, looking all the prettier in such a spot. And from the
top of its tall staff the meteor flag of England was streaming straight
out in the gale. The village--it seems to be the only village in the
colony--consists of one street built mostly of wood and corrugated
iron, with a few better houses of stone whitewashed, and reminded us
faintly of the little seaside hamlets of Shetland or the Hebrides,
though here there was neither a fishlike smell nor any signs of the
industry which dominates those islands. All was plain and humble,
but decent, and not without a suggestion of internal comfort. The
only colour was given by some splendid bushes of yellow gorse in full
flower, an evidence that though it is never warm here, the thermometer
never falls very low. The climate is extremely healthy, but the winds
are so strong and incessant that everybody goes about stooping forward.
The isles were uninhabited when discovered, a fact creditable to
the aborigines of South America, for a more unpromising spot for a
settlement of savages could not be imagined; no wood and no food either
on the land or on the sea. At present there are about two thousand
three hundred inhabitants, nearly all of British origin, including a
good many Scots brought hither as shepherds, for the colony is now one
enormous sheep-farm, probably the biggest in the world, and lives off
the wool and skins it sends home and the living sheep it exports for
breeding purposes to Punta Arenas. Wild cattle, descendants of a few
brought long ago by the earlier settlers, were once numerous, but have
now almost disappeared; and the tall tussock grass, which was such a
feature in the days of Sir James Ross's Antarctic Expedition (1840),
has vanished, except from some of the smaller isles. Poor is the
prospect for an agriculturist, for the climate permits nothing to ripen
except potatoes and turnips with a few gooseberries and currants. As
in most oceanic islands, the native land fauna, especially of mammals,
is extremely scanty, and, what is stranger, there are, so one is told,
so few fish in the sea that it is not worth while to face the storms
to catch them. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, meant to justify the
laziness as timidity of those who won't go out. Certain it is that the
sea is always rough, and there are no fishing boats about. Neither are
there roads; the population is so thin that they would cost more than
its needs justify, and locomotion, even on horseback, is hindered by
the bogs and swamps that fill the hollows.
One naturally asks in the spirit which fills us all to-day, whether
anything can be done to "develop the place," _i.e._ to find some
resources for the people and help them to make something more of the
islands. Well, there are the seals which frequent the coast. They
belong to a species different from that of the North Pacific, but with
an equally valuable fur. Some are now taken by the few whaling vessels
which still resort to these tempestuous seas, but nothing is done to
prevent their destruction within territorial waters or to preserve a
land herd, and it would no doubt be difficult to exercise effective
control on such a wild and thinly peopled coast. Yet what one heard on
the spot seemed to suggest that steps might be taken by international
agreement for the protection and utilization of these and other large
marine mammals both here and in the other islands in this part of the
ocean. Some of the rarer species are threatened with extinction.[76]
The arrangements recently made by a treaty between Great Britain, the
United States, Russia, and Japan, for the benefit of the North Pacific
sealing industry constitute a useful precedent.
There are ports enough to furnish all the west coast of South America
with harbours of refuge, but no use for them, for few ships come
this way, and, as has been said, nobody goes fishing. Yet far out of
the world's highways as they lie, and slight as is their economic or
political value, the Falkland Isles have had a long and chequered
history. An English navigator, Davis, discovered them in A.D. 1592,
and they were afterwards explored by a French voyager from the port of
St. Malo, whence the name of Iles Malouines, by which the French still
call them. In 1764 Bougainville, one of those famous seamen who adorned
the annals of France in that century, and whose name is now preserved
from oblivion by the pretty, mauve-coloured flower which grows over all
the bungalows and railway stations of India, planted a little colony
here, with the view, fantastic as it seems to us now, of making this
remote corner of the earth a central point from which to establish a
transoceanic dominion of France in the Southern Hemisphere to replace
that which had been lost at Quebec in 1759. The Spaniards, desiring
no neighbours in that hemisphere, dispossessed these settlers. An
English colony planted shortly afterwards, presently driven out by the
Spaniards, and then re-established, was withdrawn in 1774. Finally, in
1832, the British government resumed possession of the islands, then
practically uninhabited, for the sake of the whale fishery, and in 1843
a government was organized. In its present form, it is of the type
usual in small British colonies, viz. a governor with an executive and
a legislative council, the two bodies nominated, and consisting almost
entirely of the same persons.
These political vicissitudes have left no abiding mark, except in
a few remains at the station of Port Louis which the French made
their capital, for there never was any population to speak of till
sheep-farming began. The Pacific liners call once a month on their
outward and inland voyages, and steamers go now and then to Punta
Arenas, but there are no British possessions nearer than Cape Colony
to the northeast and Pitcairn Island to the northwest, thousands of
miles away.
We walked with the Acting Governor to the top of a hill behind Port
Stanley to get some impressions of nature. There were as yet only
two or three flowers in bloom, and what chiefly struck us was the
resemblance of the thick, low mats and cushions of the plants to
some species that grow on the upper parts of the Scottish Highland
mountains. Among these, there was one producing a sweet berry, the
dillydilly, from which excellent jam is made, the only edible wild
product of the country. The prevailing strata are quartzose schists
and sandstones, which rise in two mountains to heights exceeding two
thousand three hundred feet, and as there is no trace of volcanic
action anywhere, the islands are evidently not a link between the
great Antarctic volcanoes and those of the Andean system, but perhaps
a detached part of the older rocks through which those volcanoes have
risen.
From the hilltop we looked over a wide stretch of rolling hills
covered with short grass, which in the wet hollows was yellowish or
brown. Ridges or peaklets of bare white or blue rock rose here and
there into miniature mountains, and there were runs of loose stones
on the slopes below the ridges,--altogether a wild landscape, with
no woods, no fields, no signs of human life except in the village
beneath, yet redeemed from dreariness by the emerald brilliance of
the air and the variety of lights and shadows falling on the far-off
slopes. The evening tints were mirrored in the landlocked inlet below,
and beyond the outer bay the cold, grey, ever-troubled sea stretched
away towards the South Pole. We felt as if quite near the South Pole,
yet were no nearer to it than the North Pole is to Liverpool. One
seemed to have reached the very end of the world. Though one might be
reminded a little of the Hebrides,--all windswept islands have points
of resemblance,--still the scenery was not really like any part of
our Northern Hemisphere, but had a character of its own. I have seen
many wild islands in many stormy seas, and some of them more bare and
forbidding than this, but never any inhabited spot that seemed so
entirely desolate and solitary and featureless. There was nothing for
the eye to dwell upon, no lake, no river, no mountain,--only scattered
and shapeless hills,--a land without form or expression, yet with a
certain simple and primitive beauty in the colours of the yellow grass
and grey-blue rocks, shining through clear air, with the sea-wind
singing over them. No spot could better have met the wishes of the
hermits who, in early Christian centuries, planted themselves on rocky
islets and lonely mountain tops on the coasts of Ireland, for here
there is nothing, even in Nature herself, to distract a pious soul from
meditation. Any one who to-day desires seclusion to think out a new
philosophy might find this a fitting place of peace, if only he could
learn to endure the perpetual drive of the wind.
The last flush of sunset was reddening on the inlet when we re-joined
our steamer and sailed down past the lighthouse out into the ocean,
a fresh flock of sea-birds appearing to bear us company. Three more
stormy days and stormy nights northward to Montevideo!